Themes

"Merit is a work for the sake of which Christ gives rewards. But no such work is to be found, for Christ gives by promise. Just as if a prince should say to me, "Come to me in my castle, and I will give you a hundred florins." I do a work, certainly, in going to the castle, but the gift is not given me as the reward of my work in going, but because the prince promised it to me."

"Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.”"

"He who thinks to be justified by any strength or merit of his own, and not by faith, puts himself in the place of God."

"On their own merits modest men are dumb."

"...Fatherland without freedom and merit is a large word with little meaning."

"View the whole scene, with critic judgment scan, And then deny him merit if you can. Where he falls short, 'tis Nature's fault alone Where he succeeds, the merit's all his own."

"Thy father's merit sets thee up to view, And shows thee in the fairest point of light, To make thy virtues, or thy faults, conspicuous."

"Keep five yards from a carriage, ten yards from a horse, and a hundred yards from an elephant; but the distance one should keep from a wicked man cannot be measured."

"Every man will be a poet if he can; otherwise a philosopher or man of science. This proves the superiority of the poet."

"The awareness that we are all human beings together has become lost in war and through politics."

"When I die, my epitaph or whatever you call those signs on gravestones is going to read: "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I dident like". I am so proud of that I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come to my grave you will find me sitting there, proudly reading it."

"It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army. These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid."

"A great man left a watchword that we can well repeat: "There is no indispensable man"."

"Man, created to God's image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27), is not just flesh and blood. The sexual instinct is not all that he has. Man is also, and pre-eminently, intelligent and free; and thanks to these powers he is, and must remain, superior to the rest of creation; they give him mastery over his physical, psychological and affective appetites."

"Men are men before they are lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians."

"Who is wise? He that learns from every One. Who is powerful? He that governs his Passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody."

"The Divine government of the world is like a stream that rolls under us; men are only as bubbles that rise on its surface; some are brighter and larger, and sparkle longer in the sun than others; but all must break; whilst the mighty current rolls on in its wonted majesty!"

"But if, indeed, there be a nobler life in us than in these strangely moving atoms; if, indeed, there is an eternal difference between the fire which inhabits them, and that which animates us,— it must be shown, by each of us in his appointed place, not merely in the patience, but in the activity of our hope, not merely by our desire, but our labor, for the time when the dust of the generations of men shall be confirmed for foun: dations of the gates of the city of God."

"Man has wants deeper than can be supplied by wealth or nature or domestic affections. His great relations are to his God and to eternity."

"Let us not undervalue the dignity of human nature. Man. although fallen, still retains some traces of his primeval glory and excellence — broken columns of a celestial temple, magnificent, even in its ruins."

"Man is the crowning of history and the realization of poetry, the free and living bond which unites all nature to that God who created it for Himself."

"In that vast march, the van forgets the rear; the individual is lost; and yet the multitude is many individuals. He faints and falls and dies; man is forgotten; but still mankind move on, still worlds revolve, and the will of God is done in earth and heaven."

"The older I grow — and I now stand upon the brink of eternity — the more comes back to me that sentence in the Catechism which I learned when a child, and the fuller and deeper its meaning becomes, "What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever.""

"I weigh the man, not his title: 'tis not the king's inscription can make the metal better or heavier."

"When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead!"

"I am an acme of things accomplished, and I am encloser of things to be."

"Silver is the king's stamp; man God's stamp, and a woman is man's stamp; we are not current till we pass from one man to another."

"Quod, ut dictur, si est homo bulla, eo magis senex."

"Der edle Mensch ist nur ein Bild von Gott."

"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

"Man is man, and master of his fate."

"Homo vitæ commodatus, non donatus est."

"When I beheld this I sighed, and said within myself, Surely man is a Broomstick!"

"Titles of honour are like the impressions on coin—which add no value to gold and silver, but only render brass current."

"Give us a man of God's own mould Born to marshall his fellow-men; One whose fame is not bought and sold At the stroke of a politician's pen. Give us the man of thousands ten, Fit to do as well as to plan; Give us a rallying-cry, and then Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man."

"Of the king's creation you may be; but he who makes a count, ne'er made a man."

""How poor a thing is man!" alas 'tis true, I'd half forgot it when I chanced on you."

"Der Mensch ist, der lebendig fühlende, Der leichte Raub des mächt'gen Augenblicks."

"Thou art the man."

"A man after his own heart."

"Quit yourselves like men."

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are."

"Man is man's A, B, C. There's none that can Read God aright, unless he first spell man."

"Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright."

"Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels."

"Man is the measure of all things."

"So, if unprejudiced you scan The going of this clock-work, man, You find a hundred movements made By fine devices in his head; But 'tis the stomach's solid stroke That tells his being what's o'clock."

"No more was seen the human form divine."

"A minister, but still a man."

"Homo homini lupus."